How To Get More YouTube Views: Top 3 Tips

On the web, if you want your product to get noticed, people need to be able to find it. When looking for a market to utilize to make that happen, you need to go somewhere people’s eyes are headed—and staying—to ensure the best results. Google is the big one of course, attracting 1.1 billion users every day (more than 1/7th of the planet). There are other websites that come to mind—Yahoo, Facebook, MSN—that attract quite a few users too. But the second biggest site to take advantage of is one used by about 1 billion people every day.

I’m talking YouTube.

The video website was one of the web’s biggest earners last year, netting somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion. This was achieved by getting users to watch 4 billion videos per day (6 billion hours per month). The best part of this is, those videos were all sought after by users without prompt and often, without any call to action.

That’s a lot of eyes. Which makes it perplexing almost nobody is using this site for advertising.

With the buying power of the cord-cutting millennials beginning to dictate new markets, it’s almost baffling only nine percent of small businesses take advantage of a medium 72 percent of these consumers use on a daily basis. It’s similar to the shift in advertising seen in the print world of newspapers and magazines; as the internet became a more viable source for information, advertisers began to migrate. And though your business may already utilize SEO on its website and in how you promote yourself in search engines, optimized video will soon replace the television commercial as a prime means of visual exposure.

Here’s how to get more YouTube views:

#1 – Build Your Presence

We’ll call this the Tom Cruise example; for people to seek out your brand and be willing to watch your content, you need to establish yourself not just for what you do, but the image you present yourself with. Nobody, I will assure you, would have any interest in Mission Impossible Five or Tom Cruise if they didn’t know what he was already about, as established from the first few films he put out. To set the ground floor, when you sign up for a YouTube profile, you need to be sure your brand is simply and boldly presented on your page. An easy-to-remember URL, definitive branding and a simple to understand bio with information about your company and what it does.

A custom URL is another key, but often overlooked aspect of your page to look into. To qualify for this, you must have a profile of at least 30 days old and with more than 500 subscribers, as well as actual art for your channel. There are no tips at getting to this point other than producing content people will want to see, and that comes with creativity, consistency and of course, self promotion. Of course, in promoting yourself, it all comes down to the number one rule of search engine optimization, which is…

#2 – Keywords are key

Whenever you’re trying to take advantage of a search engine’s algorithms, you need to remember the system isn’t analyzing the visual presentations you’ve spent so much time putting together to figure out what it’s about. No, it’s still sifting through the text to make its decision. With careful keywording and tagging for your video, you can predict what customers are typing into their search boxes when looking for your business, and write around those. Good SEO keywording is prediction what the seeker is going to type when looking for your business (or someone similar.) Make sure you define that clearly.

#3 – Be descriptive

The modern online viewer is a discerning one, and with so little time to waste, the only real thing driving them to viewing your video is the little box of text beneath the video or even the thumbnail. Make it short, make it sweet and make it pop, all while describing exactly what the viewer can expect. You can even use this to build your brand, by establishing a unique voice for your brand or even linking to other content to keep the conversation and engagement going. Just remember, on a stage shared by millions, you’re going to want to stand out to get the crowd’s gaze on you.